10 A.M., May 21, 2019

Sale 10074




Lot 79, "Sailing on the Hudson near Nyack," by Francis Augustus Silva, oil on canvas, 20 by 36 inches,

This May 21, 2019 auction at Sotheby's New York of American Art is highlighted by a fine abstract landscape by Georgia O'Keeffe, a great Hudson River scene by Francis Augustus Silva, a great mountain scene by Sanford Robinson Gifford.

Lot 79 is a wonderful oil on canvas by Francis Augustus Silva (1835-1886) that is entiled "Sailing on the Hudson near Nyack."  It measures 20 by 36 inches.

The catalogue provides the following commentary:

"Painted in 1872, Francis Augustus Silva’s Sailing on the Hudson near Nyack depicts a broad view of the Hudson River Palisades and Hook Mountain near Nyack, New York as viewed from the Hudson River. New York’s early Dutch settlers referred to Hook Mountain as Verdrietige Hook, or 'tedious point,' due to the forceful gusts of winds that sailors encountered while traveling through this region of the river. The present work dates to a period of exceptional output for Silva, who traveled frequently from New Jersey to Massachusetts in search of desirable subject matter. Art historian Mark D. Mitchell writes, 'By far the most famous of Silva’s themes from this early period was not formal, but geographic: The Hudson River…his Hudson River scenes are his most charming and effective early works…The correspondence between the Hudson River and the quality of these paintings is virtually inexplicable, as they stand apart aesthetically from his other work of the early 1870s. Perhaps the phenomenon is best explained simply as a serendipitous consequence of time and geography of Silva’s concurrent artistic maturation and awareness of his Hudson River School predecessors on their turf' (Francis A. Silva: In His Own Light, New York, 2002, pp. 33-34).

"Sailing on the Hudson near Nyack represents one of Silva’s most successful forays in the Luminist idiom. Preeminent scholar John I. H. Baur first coined the term 'Luminism' in 1954 to distinguish a group of Hudson River School artists, including Silva, Martin Johnson Heade, and Fitz Henry Lane, among others, for their unambiguously American consciousness of the effects of light and atmosphere. In her discussion of the distinct characteristics of the Luminist movement, the art historian Barbara Novak writes, 'Luminist light tends to be cool, not hot, hard not soft, palpable rather than fluid, planar rather than atmospherically diffuse. Luminist light radiates, gleams, and suffuses on a different frequency than atmospheric light…Air cannot circulate between the particles of matter that comprise Luminist light' (Nature and Culture, London, 1980, pp. 18, 29).

"The eastern seaboard, specifically the Hudson River Valley, was a favored subject of Luminist painters, who were attracted to the region’s clear light and relatively undeveloped shores. In Sailing on the Hudson, Nyack, Silva deliberately heightened the atmospheric effects of sunlight to convey the transcendent qualities of the natural world and man’s spiritual relationship to the physical environment."

The lot has an estimate of $700,000 to $1,000,000.  It sold for $740,000 including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article.

The sale total was $19,021,250 with only 62.7 percent of the 83 offered lots selling.

Lot 67, "A Lake Twilight," by Gifford

Lot 10, "Waterfall, No. 2, Iao Valley, oil on canvas, 24 by 20 inches, 1939

Lot 73, "Two Arapaho," by Alfred Jacob Miller, watercolor and gouache on paper laid down on card, 9 1/2 by 12 1/14 inches

Lot 46, "Ruins at Baalbeck," by Frederic Edwin Church, oil on canvas, 21 3/4 by 36 1/8 inches, 1868

"A chance, congenial encounter at Beirut, Lebanon, prompted this, Frederic Edwin Church's first full-fledged Near Eastern studio venture. Church painted this work during his only transatlantic journey, November 1867 to June 1869. Accompanied by his wife, young son, and mother-in-law, he visited several European countries including France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, portions of the Ottoman Empire in the southern Mediterranean, Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece. The southerly segments of their family travels were commemorated in a recent touring U.S. museum exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts, Frederic Edwin Church: A Painter's Pilgrimage, 2017-18.

"Edward F. de Lancey, (1821-1905) a widowed New York lawyer then touring Asia Minor whom Church met at Beirut during January or February 1868, commissioned the present picture. Church began the canvas while at his seaside Beirut hotel, continued working on it mid-year in Alpine Germany, completed it at Rome autumn 1868, and sent the finished picture to de Lancey in New York via London. In effect the painting became the artist's long-distance Syrian surrogate during the sole calendar year he spent away from the United States in 1868.  Church much liked the result; he reported that visitors to his Rome studio admired it; the buyer, de Lancey, also liked it. The scene is a capriccio—i.e., composed prospect involving fictive ruined architecture. It moodily visualizes sparse Ottoman Syrian Roman remnants at sundown amid the region's semi-deserts, weathered, horizontally proportioned mountains, elongated coastline, and thinned human and domesticated animal populations. Its current title is modern and approximate. No early designation is recorded; it was not, apparently, publicly exhibited at the time. In extant documents Church termed it "a Syrian subject." An undated torn, yellowed typewritten label on the back of the stretcher which says, correctly, that it was painted "by order," identifies it as "The Lebanon Mountains."

"In three extant letters...written during 1868 from, respectively, Beirut, Paris, and New York, de Lancey discussed the commission, referring also to correspondence from the artist, one letter existing...the others unfortunately lost. Initially de Lancey asked only that Church paint something of 'oriental character as a memento of my visit to these ancient and sacred lands.' As de Lancey later made clear, Church conceived combining inland features and 'a stretch of the Mediterranean with that soft and superb blue, that it has only in the East.' De Lancey liked that idea, shared Church's vicarious fascination with ruined Palmyra in present-day Syria, and considered accompanying him to Palmyra; unfavorable circumstances, however, cancelled that journey for both of them. After starting the canvas, Mr. and Mrs. Church did visit Baalbek, in Lebanon's fertile Bekaa Valley, May 1868. In the present painting, the Corinthian columnar remnants and parched setting are, one might say wistfully, more Palmyrean—or perhaps evocative of Kunawat, Borsra, in present-day Syria, or Jerash, in present-day Jordan (to neither of which Church went, either, but which he knew through visual and verbal sources)—than Baalbekian. The painting's most Baalbekian aspect is the collapsed Corinthian capital at lower left, which simplifies Church's on-site penciled and painted vignette (Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; inv. no. 1917-4-581) of Baalbek's 'Temple of Bacchus.' Lebanese seaside classical sites today within automobile reach of Beirut at Tyre and Byblos, both (particularly the former) with impressive upright columns, are mostly modern re-erections. Church passed Tyre south of Beirut five times by boat (the first, at night) but made no mention of it in extant documents; Byblos, north of Beirut, he may not have seen. He could, however, have read about both places, and he acquired at least one photograph (at Olana) of 'Old Tyre.' En route to Petra, in Jordan, during a key sketching expedition from Beirut February-March 1868, he had traversed impressive inland deserts. Ruins of Baalbek affirms that soon after settling at Beirut, which served as his base of operations between January and May 1868, he consulted available prints and photographs of regional antiquities and leafed books to which he has access, coordinating those sources with increasing firsthand experiences and letting his imagination roam.

"As a studio project, the present picture was re-orienting—or Orientalizing—for Church. He began it just weeks after having surveyed in London during December 1867 with a well-connected English escort, the editor, playwright and art critic Tom Taylor (1817-80), the bewildering studio contents which J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), the far-famed English landscape and marine painter, had bequeathed to Britain. An autographed photograph portrait of Taylor dated 'Dec 1867,' preserved at Church's former home, Olana, in Upstate New York (New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Olana State Historic Site, Taconic Region; inv. no. 1986.228), helps document their rendezvous. That encounter couldn't have been more timely: shortly before he himself set foot in the Mediterranean, Church sought, and obtained, comprehensive contact with Turner's art. Between 1857 and 1865 Taylor had favorably reviewed for the London Times newspaper four displays in London of Church's major Western Hemisphere canvases. During his career Church was influenced by and often compared to Turner. Prior to 1867, Church would have counted himself lucky to have viewed the two principal paintings by Turner then in the U.S. Both were marines with ships, and both were owned by James Lenox (1800-80), a wealthy, reclusive New York philanthropist and bibliophile whose prodigious book, manuscript, and art collections remained mostly sequestered until after his death. More than once American journalists of the 1850s and 1860s had alluded longingly to Lenox's Turners, "which everybody has heard of but nobody has seen." Church's privileges thereto stemmed from his having painted for Lenox a major equatorial canvas, Cotopaxi (1862; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan). In London a half-dozen years later—select framed works by Turner were then housed at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, while the remainder and his studio materials were in storage—Taylor helped release for Church a floodgate of artistic stimuli in that vein. Years later Church recollected having viewed there 'a great many of Turner's smaller pictures and sketches.' Turner had been enraptured by Italy, particularly Venice, which, admittedly, didn't interest Church. Turner had not traversed the southern Mediterranean, nor had he seen mainland or isled Greece, but he had known people who had. Aided by their testimonies and his own literary and image prowlings, from the eighteen-teens he frequently painted evocative fantasies involving ancient Rome and Roman personages and deities, and, occasionally, ancient Greek equivalents qua Greece. Though landscape vocabularies Turner mulled fabled empires, conquests and defeats, imposing sharp-edged and crumbled edifices, and pullulating crowds. In those respects as in others, Turner was heir to the French Baroque landscapist who had lived in Rome, Claude Lorrain (1600-82), as Church also knew.

"Church's Ruins of Baalbek attenuates Turner's mid- and late-life Mediterranean oeuvre and to a lesser extent Claude's images with ruined architecture, while maintaining Church's signature verisimilitude. In 1992 ('Frederic Edwin Church and Italy;' cited above) I wrote that the present painting 'is spare, desiccated, granular, as though atmosphere as well as objects were defined through shifting sands.' Recent technical examination done at the Detroit Institute of Arts suggests that the canvas has lost some of its original subtleties, and that during the painting process Church changed his mind about portions of the composition. Regardless, it was always thinly brushed. Overall the finished painting was, and remains, deliberately distinct from anything he'd previously done in his studio(s). De Lancey's third letter to Church recapped Church's satisfaction with the picture and pondered its possible public display. 'As to when & where to have it shown here, write me at once your own wishes, & they shall be fully carried out,' de Lancey offered. 'In my own house of course, very many would not see it, whom you would like to see it for your own sake.  And as you tell me it is the 'finest' in color & possesses 'more sentiment' than any you have yet executed—the public for their own sake should have a free opportunity of viewing it...I feel from what you say, that you have produced an extraordinary work, and am truly grateful that you have taken so much interest in my commission as to do so" (Letter from Frederic Edwin Church to Edward de Lancey, Hudson, New York, November 23, 1868).

"Church's next Mediterranean studio canvas, the same-size Valley of the Lebanon..., was painted entirely at Rome. There, the depicted architecture is more ample, abundant, and particularized, the firmament and staffage comparatively intricate, and the environment inland. Because of problems with that painting's prospective English buyer, Church consigned Valley of the Lebanon (one of several titles accorded that canvas early on) to the American art market, by which means it became, November 1869, his first Mediterranean-theme work displayed in the U.S.

"It seems to me that the muted Turnerian tenor of Ruins of Baalbek honestly signals Church at that initiating transitional period for him, 1868, and the bolder Valley of the Lebanon at that subsequent transitional period, 1868-69. Through his travels in Europe and especially the Mediterranean, he really did want artistically to re-frame but avoid duplicating himself. I would say that he succeeded. It counts that he believed he had, as well."

"Thomas Cole’s singular legacy remains as the progenitor of the Hudson River School, the first native art movement born within the United States. Learning from Cole, ensuing generations of painters working within this genre were able to visually parallel the untapped resources of the American wilderness with the potent energy of a maturing nation. Born in Lancaster, England in 1801, Cole emigrated to the United States with his family and settled in Philadelphia when he was seventeen. By 1825 Cole had moved repeatedly, spending time in Ohio and Pittsburgh, before arriving in New York where he traveled up the Hudson River for the first time. The young painter quickly rose to significant prominence within New York’s cultural community to become one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design the same year.

"Cole’s early success enabled him to take the 'Grand Tour' in 1829, visiting England, France and Italy over a three year period. While he virulently disliked the French artists of his day, Cole found refuge in the natural splendor of Italy. Like many in the American cultural and intellectual elite of the early nineteenth century, Cole developed a strong interest in the compelling duality of Italian history. Visiting Americans could marvel at the former majesty and achievement of their Roman past, lamenting its dissolution ever-present in the Romantic ruins and crumbling aqueducts, and claiming their nation as the intellectual successor to the Classical world. 

"Compared to the robust, unconquerable landscapes that define Cole’s Hudson River paintings, Sunset on the Arno presents a softer, more tranquil version of nature. Defined by the serpentine Arno river, which eaves through the foreground and middleground of the picture, the composition encourages the viewer’s eye to meander through the picturesque countryside. To the right and above in the distance are the dark woods of the Cascine. Beyond them, the mountain summit half dissolves in the vapory splendor of an Italian sunset. Although there are several structures present in the composition, they too seem only a degree removed from the natural world, mere elements of the background and not the intended subject of the work. An airy warmth radiates from the fading sun and the river is denoted by pale amber tones with highlights of dusty pinks and warmer blues.

"As with his trips through Upstate New York and New England, Cole kept sketchbooks full of careful pictorial and written notes while traveling through Italy. He heavily relied on this documentation as an aide-mémoire for his studio compositions. Cole rarely based his final canvases on a single sketch or description, choosing instead to amalgamate multiple sources combined with elements from his imagination. Per this working process, Cole completed Sunset on the Arno in 1837, five years following his return to North America, and one year after he completed his celebrated series The Course of Empire (1833-36, New-York Historical Society, New York). As in his best compositions, the present work demonstrates Cole's unique ability to “draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts, which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime, dominant in the mind” (Matthew Baigell, Thomas Cole, New York, 1981, p. 13).

"This harmonization of precise details of compositional elements, such as the charming river boats and their canopies, with the atmospheric and ambiguous setting of countryside bathed in early evening light, creates a compellingly timeless vision of Italy. The stillness and tranquility of the composition presents the viewer with a vista that feels unaffected by time, and a way of life lived in continuity for centuries. The Italian landscape offered the American creative intellect a tangible heritage—a visible past which was not found in the uncultivated wilderness of their native land."

The lot has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000.  It failed to sell.

Lot 20, "The Carpenters," by Jacob Lawrence, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper, 19 1/2 by 25 1/2 inches, 1946

Lot 16, "Shakespeare at Dusk," by Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 17 1/4 by 25 1/8 inches, 1935